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Things to do this week in NYC Jan 24-Jan 31: Museums

Some of the world's most impressive museums and exhibits are in New York?including the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and (of course) the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One of the great things to do in NYC is to visit these spectacular collections. Whether you're a native New Yorker or here on vacation, NYC's museums have something new and interesting to offer everybody! Here is a list of what's going on this week at museums throughout New York City.

An examination of the street as subject matter, venue, and source of inspiration for artists and photographers from the late 1950s to the present. This far-ranging exhibition, one of the largest to consider the subject, includes street photography; documentation of performance, events, and artworks presented in the street; works using material from the street; and examples of street culture by more than thirty artists including William Klein, Lee Friedlander, Raymond Hains, Vito Acconci, Martha Rosler, Sophie Calle, David Hammons, Jamel Shabazz, and Francis Al�s, among others.

The first solo exhibition and retrospective of the artist's work in a New York museum. It will include paintings as well as ceramic sculptures and furniture made by the New York-based artist over the last forty years.

Free admission to the museum all evening. Unveiling of Peace by Piece: The Norwalk Community Quilt Project, an intergenerational community project designed to enhance the lives of young people and elders in Norwalk.

To celebrate the retiring Philippe de Montebello's years as director of the Met, the Museum's Forum of Curators, Conservators, and Scientists has organized an exhibition of approximately three hundred works of art -- from a total of more than eighty-four thousand -- that were acquired during his tenure.

Participating artists include CES, CEY, DR. REVOLT, EZO, KET, KLASS, MARE 139, REVS, SHARP and SP. The sculptures of REVS and MARE 139 incorporate immediate reference to spontaneity of the lines used in graffiti writing, along with the curves and crevices of the art form. CES and SHARP create Wild Style or intricate, expressive designs with letters that look like abstractions. In CES's paintings, his name appears always at the center of the canvas, while SHARP's style is baroque, expressive and dissolving into abstracted forms of letters forming spirals, circles and organic forms. CEY's pieces rely on the use of typography and layering by overlapping text. DR. REVOLT, EZO, KET and KLASS' paintings are inspired in the iconography of urban life, popular culture and market brands. Their works comment on urban and street life and street violence, with tones that range from humor to sarcasm, or by tapping into the subjective view of the urban condition and the urban landscape.

Sculptor Alexander Calder is generally considered one of the most beloved, important, and critically acclaimed artists of the last century, and the Whitney is offering this eye-opening look into his early career. From the ages of 27 to 34, Calder created his first wire drawings in space, invented his signature mobiles, and began to create Cirque Calder, a miniature circus fashioned from wire, string, rubber, cloth, and other found objects, pictured above.

This exhibition of the work of the acclaimed painter includes approximately seventy paintings and thirty-five drawings, providing a comprehensive examination of the work of one of the most thought-provoking and fascinating artists working today.

An exploration of not only architecture and design, but also film, fashion, and the performing arts. Styles from Art Deco to neo-romanticism will be examined along with the work of such legendary figures as Helena Rubinstein, Coco Chanel, Salvador Dali­­, and Josephine Baker, and lesser-known figures such as costume and set designer Pavel Tchelitchew. The exhibition and its accompanying publication (Monacelli Press, forthcoming in September 2008) will bring together never-before-exhibited drawings, furnishings, decorative objects, costumes, photographs, posters, and films.

International in scope and possessing one of the most diverse and comprehensive collections of design works in existence, the Museum's rich holdings range from the Han Dynasty (200 B.C.) to the present day and total more than 200,000 objects. This exhibition will feature recent acquisitions to all four of the museum's collecting departments: Product Design and Decorative Arts; Drawings, Prints and Graphic Design; Textiles; and Wallcoverings.

American-born artist Alexander Calder (1898–1976) is celebrated for his mobiles, stabiles, paintings, and objets d'art. This landmark exhibition will be the first museum presentation dedicated solely to his extensive output of inventive jewelry. During his lifetime Calder produced approximately 1,800 pieces of brass, silver, and gold body ornaments, often embellished with found objects such as beach glass, ceramic shards, and wood. Calder Jewelry will feature approximately 90 works—bracelets, necklaces, earrings, brooches, and tiaras—many of which were made as personal gifts for the artist's family and friends. While Calder's more diminutive avant-garde creations converged closely with the aesthetics of the modern age, they always remained personal and unmistakably Calder.

Some 900 outstanding examples of medieval art created between the fourth and 14th centuries return to view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's newly expanded Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries for Byzantine Art and new Gallery for Western European Art from 1050 to 1300. The new galleries incorporate the recently acquired "Jaharis Byzantine Lectionary"—an important, rare, and beautifully ornamented liturgical manuscript from about 1100—in an apse-like space, while the former Medieval Tapestry Hall has been transformed into a grand space for the presentation of western European art from the Middle Ages.

This exhibition includes large-scale canvases from Rothko's classic period of the 1950s and 1960s, when the paintings had already transcended representation and reached a purity of meaning held solely in color, texture, depth, and proportion. Phillips's greatest achievements are surveyed through masterpieces from 1815 through the 1830s.

Organized by the New-York Historical Society in collaboration with the Virginia Historical Society, the exhibition explores the most critical decades in American history through the lives of two towering men. By telling the stories of Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), commander of the Union armies and later 18th President of the United States, and of Robert E. Lee (1807–1870), commander of the Confederate forces, the exhibition brings to life not only these two compelling figures but the forces that have shaped America, in their time and our own.

A number of contemporary artists have revitalized the tenants of Romanticism, but with a twist. They make art that preserves many of the characteristics of their predecessors, but dispenses with their naiveté, absolutism, and egomania. Damaged Romanticism features fifteen (15) international artists who work in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, photography, and mixed-media installations.

Batiste Madalena (American, b. Italy, 1902–1988) was hired by George Eastman during the late period of silent cinema to design and hand-paint film posters for his theater in Rochester, NY -- at the time the third-largest cinema in the U.S. Working alone over a four-year period and against deadlines that required as many as eight new posters a week for each change of bill, Madalena created over 1,400 unique works before the end of his tenure, when the theater changed management. Approximately 250 of these posters survived when the artist himself rescued them from the trash behind the theater. Madalena's rediscovery in the 1980s brought his brilliantly colored, singular designs, done in tempera paint on illustration board, to the attention of critics and collectors, and soon made him one of the most celebrated advertising artists for moving pictures. This exhibition consists of fifty-three posters drawn from institutional and private collections and from the Museum's collection.

Growing and Greening New York: PlaNYC and the Future of the City, on view at the Museum of the City of New York December 11, 2008, through April 12, 2009, will make the complexities of greater environmental sustainability in New York City vivid, compelling, and understandable by bringing environmental concerns to life on an individual, human scale. Organized in terms of a typical day in the life of a New Yorker, the exhibition will explore six essential areas addressed by the Bloomberg Administration's ambitious five-borough plan for sustainability by 2030: water; transportation; energy; open space; land; and climate change. The exhibition will feature architectural models, interactive displays, diagrams, renderings, photographs, hands-on examples of new materials, videos, and more, many of which have been created expressly for the exhibition.

From January 30 to April 19, 2009, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will present The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, an exhibition that illuminates the dynamic and complex impact of Asian art, literature, music, and philosophical concepts on American art. The exhibition features approximately 250 works by more than 100 artists across a broad range of media-including painting, sculpture, video art, installations, works on paper, film, live performance, literary works, and ephemera-and draws from over 100 major museum and private collections in North America, Europe, and Japan.

What can America expect of a new President's first months in office? How might the new administration gain support from the public? What social, economic and political forces might be in play as the President frames an agenda and puts it into action? With questions such as these occupying people's minds as America looks ahead to January 2009, the New-York Historical Society will present the exhibition A New President Takes Command, exploring President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's history-making First Hundred Days in office.

Art show featuring folk art wood carvings from the collection of Westporters Bob and Anne Levine. The entire Levine Collection of over 800 pieces encompasses both the folk and academic styles, painted and unpainted, from the late 1700s through the 21st century, all in wood. Opening reception on January 25th beginning at 3pm.

The oldest sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum represents a woman; it was made by people living in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Syria, or Turkey in the late sixth or fifth millennium B.C.E. Nine such ancient figurines from the Museum's collection are the focus of this third Herstory Gallery exhibition, which explores them as a source of inspiration for Judy Chicago's depiction of The Fertile Goddess at The Dinner Party. The tenth figurine, on loan from Judy Chicago, is the Ceramic Goddess #3 (1977), a larger version of the female figurine on the place setting runner for The Fertile Goddess at The Dinner Party.

The porcelain factories of Berlin, Sevres, and Vienna achieved an extraordinary level of both artistic and technical skill in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the quality of painted decoration practiced at these three factories at that time has never been surpassed. This exhibition brings together approximately seventy-five superb examples from these three European porcelain manufactories and illustrates the exchange of ideas and styles between the factories that resulted in some of the most remarkable porcelain ever produced.

Drawn entirely from the extensive resources of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arts of
the Ming Dynasty: China's Age of Brilliance will present a grand array of artworks created
during one of the most celebrated dynasties in Chinese history. Featuring 80paintings and
calligraphies, including masterpieces by Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), Dong Qichang
(1555–1636), and Chen Hongshou (1599–1652), the exhibition will examine various
artistic trends as well as the distinctive personal expressions of many of the leading artists of
the time. The works will be complemented by a selection of textiles, ceramics, lacquers,
cloisonnés, jades, and bamboo carvings that will showcase the material prosperity
experienced during the period.

n honor of the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009, Taking the Oath will revisit the United States' momentous first presidential inauguration and exhibit significant artifacts from that day, including Washington's inaugural chair and the Federal Hall balustrade.